MEDIA / GALLERY / MUSIC / RESUME
I came up as a photographer and digital artist under the moniker Mishko. Originally it was all a ploy to make my high school band look like a touring act rather than some local teens. I went deep into photoshoots, posters, album covers, merch designs, and the such. When the band later split apart, my dreams of being a rockstar felt dashed. I continued to work on solo music, but began focusing more and more on my digital art, exploring through the lens of spiritual expansion & mental health. Art became a form of therapy. I began creating a new artwork, posting it on the gram, near-daily for I wanna say... 7 years? I have like 3200-something posts. That’s absurd. But through these explorations, I found my style, blending surreality, nostalgia, & psychedelia – driven by a desire to make the digital feel analog.
Channeling this style into typography led to an explosion in my online presence. I got the opportunity to create for music artists and brands from across the globe including HBO, Disney, Calvin Klein, Scholastic, Janet Jackson, Green Day, OutKast, and many more. Others became inspired to recreate my melty word art shit, leading to the style being dubbed “The Mishko Effect” like, what. It became a sort of graphic design trend far more reaching than my own output. I still get DMs from people: “Did you make this?” and it’s usually a no.
I had always wanted to be an actor deep inside, but growing up in a small logging town, that simply wasn’t a realistic idea. However, the proof was in the pudding as they say – I was the lead in the first grade play E-I-E-I-Oops in the esteemed role of Farmer Old MacDonald (basically saving the day as the original lead dropped out with only weeks to spare, and yes that is a detail I hold in high regard). The following years though, I only longingly watched as others auditioned for the school plays. Social anxiety and repressed gayness made me feel like I wasn’t allowed to perform in that capacity – what if someone started thinking I was, you know!
Once moving to LA, the acting and filmmaking thing, it’s like, oh yeah, that’s just a thing some people do, so uhhhh maybe I should just like, do it too. So I joined a two-year Meisner program at Elizabeth Mestnik Acting Studio, starred in Daniyar’s short film Two Tulips, and began directing music videos while writing a few scripts and still occassionally dabbling in music and now sound design.
Currently, I’m in Joshua LeBar’s On-Camera/Audition class.
my visual work is represented by RW Media – randirwmedia@gmail.com